27 April 2019 10:30 AM

WHAT a decade this has been for ideas long considered dead and buried to come lurching out of the grave. Marxism, not least in Jeremy Corbyn’s Labour Party; fascism, with elected legislators in Germany and Greece; what the late Frank Johnson called The Moderate Terror (Change UK, Emmanuel Macron, assorted Democratic Party candidates).

Anything missing? Well, good old-fashioned anarchism isn’t getting much of a shout. Not yet, anyway.

As one may have expected (the clue’s in the name), anarchist economic thinking is fairly…anarchic. Wikipedia tries to bring some coherence to the notion but it soon becomes clear that there are nearly as many varieties of anarchist economics as there are anarchist economists.

Broadly speaking, there’s the branch that abuts communism/socialism, stressing common ownership and the abolition of private property, and there’s the branch that envisages a future in which people work for free, safe in the knowledge that everyone else is doing the same, thus a plumber will always be able to call upon the services of a baker, and vice versa.

I am not very interested in either of these branches. More fruitful in terms of our present discontents is, I believe, the branch represented by Pierre-Joseph Proudhon (1809-1865), who drew a sharp distinction between what may be called personal private property, earned through individual labour, and what Marx may have called alienated property, such as a shareholding in a huge industrial concern.

To quote my top source, William I. Kipedia: “Proudhon favoured a right of individuals to retain the product of their labour as their own property, but believed that any property beyond that which an individual produced and could possess was illegitimate. He thus saw private property as both essential to liberty and a road to tyranny, the former when it resulted from labour and was required for labour and the latter when it resulted in exploitation (profit, interest, rent and tax).”

I couldn’t agree more. The indifference or even hostility of socialists towards personal private property (as Matthew Parris noted, they support it only when it “works”) is a key reason why I am not of their ranks, and my attitude to communal ownership of personal homes and effects is that of GK Chesterton, who declared that he did not want it even as an ideal, even as a very remote ideal – he did not want it at all.

But how someone can be said to “own” a vast business empire in which they have no hands-on involvement, or huge chunks of Scotland, is a mystery to me.

So, it turns out I have been an anarchist all along. Who’d have guessed it?

Free to live

HOWEVER, I suspect an anarchist revival, should it happen, will spring not from a mass conversion to the economic ideas of Proudhon & Co but from a colossal backlash against what I have called the Goon State, the endlessly-interfering, hectoring and nannying British public sector.

When Ronald Reagan was first elected President in 1980, former Secretary of State Henry Kissinger recalled that, about ten years earlier, he had chatted informally to groups of radical students, then in the habit of bringing Washington to a standstill with mass protests.

Unlike many Nixon henchmen, Dr K, as an academic, was quite happy to meet the undergrad fraternity. But he warned them that if they persisted in challenging an achievement-orientated society based on the family and the Protestant work ethic, they would bring about a reaction.

Reagan, said Kissinger, was that reaction.

Similarly, I do not think the political, bureaucratic and judicial class can endlessly ban things, issue directives, dream up new thought crimes and divide society between assorted protected groups and everyone else without suffering a massive reaction.

The Brexit vote was, in part, such a reaction, but there is, I feel and hope, much, much more to come.

Saturday miscellany

TALKING of nannying, did you see the apparently-uncritical press coverage this week of “UN experts” telling parents to stop young children watching television or using other screen-based devices? Who in their right minds would take child-rearing advice/instructions from “UN experts”? I’d rather listen to the local madman/meths drinker/bag lady.

HOW long, do you think, before the Royal Navy caves in to demands from “activists” (i.e. creeps and control freaks) and follows the Scottish Maritime Museum in no longer referring to ships as “she”? Officially, the Senior Service is standing firm on this one, but we all know it will fold shortly. End of the year, I’d guess.

I don’t read the Telegraph titles as carefully as I used to, so I may have missed something, but to my astonishment this week I came across only one boring, lengthy feature about a dreary individual who seems to think we care one way or another that he/she has given up drinking. Come on, Teetotalgraph, you can do better than this.

SOME time ago, my wife (an excellent negotiator) haggled a Telegraph sales chap down to a reasonable and open-ended subscription price. I’d say the result is we’re more or less paying for what we consume, i.e. the letters, the leaders, the facing page (that’s the one opposite the leaders, for non-hacks), the better bits of the business section and the obituaries. The rest? A waste of good drinking time.

AN excellent expose in this week’s edition of The Spectator by Douglas Murray of the sacking by Theresa May’s worthless “Government” of the distinguished philosopher Sir Roger Scruton after a sting operation by the New Statesman. He had been an unpaid adviser on the built environment. The key point that I took from this fine piece was that the following Tory rubbish must never be allowed anywhere near the highest offices of State: Johnny Mercer MP and spineless Cabinet Minister James Brokenshire, he who actually fired Scruton. What a piece of doggy-do.

Is this PwC/Or is this…?

A last word on anarchism. A former boss began her career not in journalism but in the accounting firm now known as PricewaterhouseCoopers. As a very junior person on a big-company audit, she rang the hugely grand audit partner one day to question an injunction in the audit rulebook. He told her to follow the rules. A few days later, she rang him about a quite different rule, and received the same response. The rest of the time, she worked long hours, diligently. Soon after, she met him face to face and introduced herself. “Ah,” he replied, “so you’re the anarchist!”

20 April 2019 10:00 AM

A lifetime ago - OK, 20 years – I wrote in The Guardian that: “[T]he manufacturer and guarantor of money, the State, is mysteriously obliged to borrow its own product from ‘the market’ at ‘competitive’ rates of interest.”

The target of this and other passages I wrote or co-wrote in articles and books was something called fractional reserve banking. Sounds boring, doesn’t it – which I suspect may be the point.

Put simply, this means banks hold only a fraction of the funds on their books, something like one-tenth, the rest being make-believe funny-money, which can be lent out, redeposited, and 90 per cent of which can then be lent again.

I describe this process in more detail in a piece for the Lion & Unicorn site.

The upshot of this is that only a sliver of the money in circulation is created by the State, comprising notes, coins and deposits at the Bank of England – the so-called monetary base.

The rest is not only created by private banks, but comes into existence only because someone, somewhere has gone into debt.

Perhaps surprisingly, in the years before the financial crisis, you were more likely to hear criticism of fractional reserve banking in America than here, from a range of groups. In our own country, perhaps the most consistent critic was the Christian Council for Monetary Justice, which can be found here.

What blew this whole racket apart was quantitative easing (QE), the multi-trillion dollar global bailout for the financial system after the 2008 crisis. Mysteriously, it emerged that the one thing we were told was an impossible and hopelessly-naïve idea – the State simply printing money – was, in fact, entirely prudent and responsible.

Now, both the Democratic Party in the US and the Labour Party here are suggesting QE could become a permanent feature of economic management. They call it modern monetary theory (MMT), and suggest reversing the current set-up whereby central banks are supposed to control inflation and taxes are meant to raise the money that governments need.

Instead, governments simply print the money they need, or write cheques to be drawn against the central bank. The role of taxation is to manage inflation, rising when needed to stem high inflation and falling when demand needs a prod.

There are a few points to be made here.

One, we have, in a much modified form, been here before. From the early Sixties to the mid-Seventies, British governments decided what they wanted to buy (miles of motorway, fighter jets or whatever) and conjured the necessary funds into existence. Taxes, especially consumption taxes, were used to apply a “touch on the brake”, or the accelerator, when necessary.

Two, what will happen to the money raised when taxes rise to choke off inflation? To be consistent with MMT, it ought to be cancelled, taken out of circulation. To use it to fund public expenditure would muddy the waters.

Three, it seems the only regulator preventing runaway public spending is the danger of runaway inflation, given the tax burden would no longer be linked to government expenditure.

Four, in light of this it is hard to see how government priorities would be selected, either at election times or any other period. No interest group is likely to be willing to be told that its demand for public funding is the one that is going to spark inflation.

I’m no fan of fractional reserve banking. But I’m not sure MMT is the answer.

Quotes of the week

BOTH come from the Telegraph titles:

On Sunday, the leader stated re. the Conservatives’ Brexit failure: “Every week, the reply has been the same from the leadership: no one cares, people just want Brexit to go away and when it does the Government can return to the tired old certainties of, say, bailing out the NHS or banning things.”

On Tuesday, Tim Stanley wrote: “I'm opposed to abortion and once you take that stand it colours the way you see everything (and the way people see you - by writing that sentence I'll lose five friends and render myself unemployable outside Poland).”

Saturday miscellany

THE late trade unionist Jimmy Reid, commenting on New Labour’s pledge to adopt a balanced approach to the demands of employers and workers, said this was jolly sporting of Mr Blair and his colleagues, given that in all the industrial disputes during his lifetime, the Tories had never once sided with those on strike. This despite the law of averages suggesting they must have been in the right on at least some occasions.

Similarly, it is unsurprising when, as in City AM on Wednesday, a business-supporting newspaper reports sympathetically the comment of the Federation of Small Businesses that: “A tight labour market represents yet another headache for small-business owners.” Of course it does – they may actually have to raise wages.

That business organisations and the media outlets that support them favour mass immigration is to be expected. Much weirder is the general enthusiasm for (in effect) open borders among trade unions and their media sympathisers.

Jolly sporting, though.

ON the subject of trade unions, I am thoroughly enjoying the latest edition of Seumas Milne’s history of the miners’ strike and its aftermath The Enemy Within (Verso; originally 1994, this edition 2014). Just one example of the wonderfully dry style is seen in reference to accusations within the miners’ union that Nell Myers, an aide to Arthur Scargill, was a CIA plant: “The main evidence appeared to be that Myers…was American.” Great evidence, guys! Watch Sherlock Holmes and Rumpole of the Bailey turn green with envy.

AS of yesterday, I have embarked on a whole ten days in which I am spared the horrors of commuting. By way of an early send-off on Wednesday, the automated announcement on the 15.07 London Bridge-Uckfield service repeated the same list of destination stations six times in the short period before we even started. Not missing you already.

I started my career in a university town in 1980, where I tried to sign up with the student grocery bureau, this being my best chance of obtaining the goods I needed to support myself. Shops were happy to supply students but less so young workers, given they knew the students would be moving on whereas the rest of us could hang round indefinitely, demanding groceries. Too bad the bureau twigged I was not an undergraduate and sent me packing. You may have spotted that I have swapped “groceries” for “accommodation”, and am recalling the days when well-meaning renting controls strangled the market. In 1988, new rentals were put on a simple contract basis, and the market flourished. Now, with its unerring instinct for getting things wrong, the pointless Conservative “Government” wants to go into reverse.

FINALLY, a (very funny) slur on the professional title I held for 12 years, courtesy of crime writer Ian Rankin. In Exit Music (Orion; 2007), his ace detective John Rebus is smuggled into the offices of The Scotsman newspaper by a friendly journalist to allow him access to press-cuttings databases. When she proposes to leave him at his terminal while she wanders off to chat to colleagues, Rebus asks what he ought to say if anyone “asks me what I am up to”? She thinks for a moment, clearly wondering what would be the dullest, most yawn-inducing job on the paper.

13 April 2019 10:30 AM

AN old friend and former colleague texts a link and advises me to feed it into Spotify to listen to a solid gold classic. My reaction to mention of Spotify was rather as with one of those doddery judges who has to ask: "What is a Ford Fiesta?", or similar.

In his kindness, my friend sent me instead a link to YouTube, which is just about within my competence. And indeed, I was soon humming along to Fox on the Run by Sweet.

As when we worked together, he texted further to quiz me on financial events at the time of the hit. Where was the FTSE? What was GDP? How high was inflation?

I was able to reply that the FTSE did not exist in 1974, that GDP shrunk by 1.1 per cent and that inflation was about 19 per cent. As an afterthought, I suggested parallels with our own time: a minority government and a constitutional crisis.

Indeed, this year may be 1974 all over again, with better food but worse music. He liked that idea.

Suppose there is something in it. Is there anything to be learned?

Well, I suppose that depends on how assorted variables work out. If you're, for example, Jacob Rees-Mogg or similar, the obvious parallel is probably as follows: a centrist Tory Prime Minister has tried and failed to suck up to people who will always loathe the party (trade unions/social liberals) and is on the way out.

Next comes the return to sound doctrine: free markets, traditional policing, an all-out assault on waste and bureaucracy, and tax cuts. An ever-worsening series of Prime Ministers tacking to the centre (Macmillan/Major, Douglas Home/Cameron, Heath/May) has brought the party to the edge of destruction. Only a latter-day Thatcher can save it.

All this assumes that "the party" means the Conservatives. But suppose the action is quite elsewhere?

Let's start with the fact that just one of the main party leaders is actually a radical, Jeremy Corbyn. Further, let's recall also that Margaret Thatcher's earlier years saw her derided for holding old-fashioned beliefs that all sensible people had ditched decades ago.

Remind you of anyone?

When it turned out, in both cases, that these hopelessly outdated views enjoyed widespread public support, various people's fuses blew, and they reacted in one of two ways. One was to tack to the opposite extreme (Tony Benn and his followers/assorted free-market types) and the other was, to use the old cliche, to hold out the promise of a better yesterday (the SDP/The Independent Group).

Should Corbyn be the new Thatcher, then the chronology becomes somewhat complicated, as Mrs May would then be cast not as another Heath but another Callaghan, and we would be in 1979, not 1974.

AS Theresa May's worthless "Government" totters on to what will, with luck, be its imminent demise, it seems determined to go down as the most repulsive and repressive regime of recent times. Here are just some of the actual or proposed recent measures from these "Conservatives":

State censorship of the internet to prohibit "fake news", making career politicians the arbiters of truth;

State regulation of home education;

Easier divorce, presumably to create more "vulnerable" children, thus generating more work and giving more power to State functionaries in the "caring" professions;

Another set of State functionaries (i.e. sex education teachers) to be encouraged to talk dirty to other people's children through an extension of "relationships" classes.

All this, and the Brexit stab in the back. Face it, they hate you.

Thanks again for reading and enjoy the weekend.

dan.atkinson@live.co.uk

Europe Didn't Work, by Larry Elliott and Dan Atkinson is published by Yale University Press

06 April 2019 10:00 AM

TWICE, perhaps three times, in my lifetime there have been strongly-voiced suggestions that a big realignment of Britain’s political arrangements is urgently required. Key to this large-scale adjustment is that all the nice, sensible people in what they imagine is the centre-ground will get together and, by doing so, represent the majority of the electorate, which itself comprises nice, sensible people.

There was the early Seventies, when it was suggested by the likes of the late Bernard Levin and the paper for which he worked, The Times, that George Brown, Reginald Maudling, Roy Jenkins and so on should former a Centre Party.

This notion never really went away, and resurfaced at the start of the Eighties with the Social Democratic Party, in league with the Liberals.

Now it’s back, with Euro-fanatic MPs storming out of both major parties to start a grouping whose only policy seems to be stop Brexit.

One important difference between then and now is that, in the Seventies and Eighties, national economic failure was said to be a direct consequence of a malfunctioning set of political arrangements. That is a little harder to argue today, given record levels of employment and rising earnings.

Indeed, the relatively benign economic climate leaves the fanatical centrists (as the late Frank Johnson would have called them) a little short of excuses for wanting to push all voices other than their own off the stage and have their own way on everything, it being a little tricky to try to explain that the real motive is a total distrust of the voters and a determination to deny them any genuine choice.

For a textbook case of this, look at the current “grand” (it isn’t really) German coalition involving the centre-right and, er, the centre-left.

But even were the country to be reeling from surging inflation, unemployment and collapsing living standards, there would remain an objection to all this middle-groundery – two, in fact.

One is that the oft-repeated claim that “most people” are located in the political centre isn’t quite right. It may well be that the (until recently, anyway) relative placidity of British people’s attitude to politics and political events suggests they tend not to get too worked up about such things.

However, it would be a mistake, I think, to conclude from this that they crave an offering comprising the most “moderate” policies of the centre-right and centre-left. Is it not possible, by contrast, that they can see advantages in both the original full-fat party programmes and thus, whatever their first preference, are able to rub along with election results other than those they had desired?

Thus, a Labour voter, confronted with a Tory victory, may console themselves that taxes may be lighter than would otherwise have been the case, corporate profits (thus maybe wages as well) higher and interference in private life less enthusiastic.

Similarly, a Conservative voter could take comfort from higher health spending, better provision for elderly people and a concerted effort on the housing front.

Imagine all these silver linings are trimmed or removed altogether. In fact, you don’t have to imagine because, at least with regard to the Tories, it’s happened already. Theresa May’s hapless government continually abases itself to people and groups that will always hate the Conservatives and everything they (used to) stand for, with the result that we have a bizarre sort-of one-party grand coalition.

So, anyone who imagined that at least a Tory administration would, for example, respect the rights of parents to educate their own children will have been sorely disappointed in recent days. The “Conservatives” plan to set up a register of home-schooled children, opening the door to endless interference from pointless council officials.

Needless to say, Amanda Spielman, head of the simultaneously worthless and sinister Ofsted, was delighted: "These proposals offer an important opportunity to make sure that all children not attending school are safe and receiving an education that prepares them for adult life.”

We all know what Ofsted means by “preparation for adult life”, don’t we?

The Times was similarly congratulatory: “Requiring children to be properly educated is…a hallmark of a civilised society.” Would that be as “well-educated” as they are in our State schools?

Laura Perrins, writing for The Conservative Woman, was bracingly realistic about right-on Tory meddling in education: “It would be one thing if the English education system were the envy of the world and our students were out-ranking all the other kids in maths and English…But many leave school functionally illiterate.”

It is to Jeremy Corbyn’s credit that he has declined to take part in this coalition of the useless. But that would involve his having to offer some sort of quid pro quo for Mrs May’s accommodations with social democracy, and why should he?

For one thing, he doesn’t have to. She caves in of her own accord, as our European enemies can testify.

For another, he actually has some beliefs, whatever you may think of them.

Finally, I mentioned that there was a second objection to centrist politics. It isn’t actually very centrist, being quintessentially no less “extreme” than any other position.